I have just noticed that this extension goes through restbase to request the PDFs; this doesn't make sense at all as restbase is doing no caching on these requests.

This means we're just adding a level of indirection for the sake of it. This should NOT be deployed to production in the current form.

Ahh, after all of the discussions we thought this was the direction the WMF was expecting of the extension, thus we made and marged https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/322121/.
Reverting this will result in mediawiki calling the service directly and saving the file locally and serving from there.

Ahh, after all of the discussions we thought this was the direction the WMF was expecting of the extension, thus we made and marged https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/322121/.
Reverting this will result in mediawiki calling the service directly and saving the file locally and serving from there.

Yeah I saw some of the discussion, and at least to me going through restbase seems an unnecessary hop in the call stack; I also couldn't find any compelling argument for going through restbase, but the discussion is quite spread around multiple tickets, so I might just have missed the point.

Happy to know it's just matter of reverting a change for us to be able to switch to calling directly, though.

stop the service and therefore pause this effort until a final decision has been made; or

move the electron service out of production to labs and offer PDFs on a best-effort basis?

IMHO, we should go with option (1) for the time being, since it is quite clear at this point that something will replace OCG. Option (2) requires effort and resources and the uncertainty and imminence of the aforementioned decision do not seem to justify it.

I think it depends on whether we want to have something running while T166188 is under way. If we don't, then it's 1. In both cases btw we should also undeploy the service in order to avoid human mistakes restarting the service, unnecessary confusion and so on.